This year’s Ideas for Freedom — the annual weekend of socialist discussion and debate hosted by Workers’ Liberty — will focus on how Marxist ideas can help turn the tide of class struggle.

For five years the ruling class, in Britain and all over the world, has been using the crisis of their system to their advantage — to ride roughshod over our living standards, our rights, and our resistance. Capitalism is widely discredited, but the tide of struggle is running strongly in the capitalists’ favour. We’ll be discussing how to change that.

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky (1886-1937), was a Bolshevik, economist, and one-time member of the Trotskyist Left Opposition against Stalin.

From 1904, Preobrazhensky sided with the Bolshevik faction in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, becoming a member of its Ural provincial bureau of the Party. During 1917, he was a delegate of the Chita Soviet in south-east Russia, and became a candidate member of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party.

70 years ago, on 22 May 1943, Stalin announced the formal shutting-down of the Communist International, the association of revolutionary socialist parties across the world set up after the Russian Revolution.

Although Moscow retained close control of the Communist Parties until the 1960s, the shutting-down was a symbolic disavowal of socialist revolution. This is how socialists commented at the time.